2 October 2004

What’s great with RSS is that some bug or poor character encoding can make blogs disappear from your view for weeks without you realizing. For instance, it’s been a week now since I last read any WordPress blog, and I only just noticed..

14 October

For a while now my RSS aggregator wasn’t reading Wordpress feeds anymore, and I didn’t understand why (not that I tried to, either).

Today I got tired of it, installed Wordpress on my server, and found what was wrong: a typo. Wordpress sends a misnamed header, and the .NET runtime (upon which 90% of RSS aggregators rely on PC) has become very picky with the latest security updates, and it just plain rejects the file.

So, if you have Wordpress, and you want to be read (at least by me), you must edit the wp-blog-header.php file, replacing “Last Modified:” with “Last-Modified:” (ie, inserting an hyphen) on line 87.

And that’s all.

I have trouble understanding why a security patch would need to reject any erroneous header rather than just ignore it, but… well, I also have trouble understanding how one could work for Microsoft, so the whole thing’s just obviously beyond my comprehension.

20 October

While we’re waiting for the Wordpress typo to be fixed (they don’t seem to be in much of a hurry, and the system’s users won’t update anyway), you can hack your RSS aggregator so it ignores the .NET security update and accepts to read Wordpress RSS feeds.

If you’re using SauceReader, you should open the saucereadergui.exe.config and add the following block at the end, just before the </configuration> line:

23 October

24 October

I want a dock for my camera. Plug it in, and the pictures download themselves into a timestamped directory, wherever I want. No click involved. Otherwise, making pictures regularly, maintaing a photolog, is too fastidious.

Hee, it’s possible, even included in Windows XP. Right-click the camera, “Properties”. Damn.